CAMBODIA COUNTRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS Thomas J. Corcoran 1952 Chargé d'Affaires, Phnom Penh William J. Cunningham 1954-1955 Administrative Assistant, Phnom Penh Samuel Clifford Adams, Jr. 1955-1957 Education Officer, ICA, Phnom Penh John M. Anspacher 1956-1958 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Phnom Penh Marshall Green 1956-1960 Regional Planning Advisor for the Far East, Washington, DC Curtis C. Cutter 1957-1959 Vice Consul, Phnom Penh William W. Thomas, Jr. 1958-1961 Economic Officer, Phnom Penh Elden B. Erickson 1958-1962 Cambodia Desk, Washington, DC Archie Bolster 1959-1960 Disbursing Officer, Phnom Penh C. Robert Moore 1959-1962 Deputy Chief of Mission, Phnom Penh William C. Trimble 1959-1962 Ambassador, Cambodia Richard Howland 1961-1963 Rotation Officer, Phnom Penh James R. Lilley 1961-1964 CIA Officer, Phnom Penh Peter M. Cody 1961-1964 Acting Director, USAID, Phnom Penh Max W. Kraus 1961-1964 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Phnom Penh Clayton E. McManaway, Jr. 1962-1964 Assistant Program Director, AID, Phnom Penh Roy T. Haverkamp 1962-1964 Political Officer, Phnom Penh James G. Lowenstein 1967-1974 Staff of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, DC 1 Mark S. Pratt 1968-1973 Desk Officer for Laos and Cambodia, Washington, DC Marshall Green 1969-1973 Assistant Secretary, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Washington, DC L. Michael Rives 1969-1970 Chargé d'Affaires, Phnom Penh 1973-1975 Laos/Cambodian Affairs, Washington, DC Andrew F. Antippas 1970-1972 Political Officer, Phnom Penh 1972-1975 Cambodian Desk Officer, Washington, DC Emory C. Swank 1970-1973 Ambassador, Cambodia Francis J. Tatu 1971-1972 Cambodia Desk Officer, Washington, DC Robert Don Levine 1971-1972 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Phnom Penh Miles Wedeman 1971-1973 Economic Counselor, Phnom Penh William N. Harben 1971-1973 Political Officer, Phnom Penh John A. Bushnell 1971-1974 Program Analysis, National Security Council, Washington, DC Paul F. Gardner 1972-1974 Political Officer, Phnom Penh Timothy Michael Carney 1972-1975 Political Officer, Phnom Penh Morton I. Abramowitz 1973-1974 Political Advisor to Commander in Chief, Pacific Command James B. Engle 1974-1975 Chargé d'Affaires, Phnom Penh Robert V. Keeley 1974-1975 Deputy Chief of Mission, Phnom Penh John Gunther Dean 1974-1975 Ambassador, Cambodia Paul E. White 1974-1975 Refugee Resettlement, USAID, Phnom Penh 2 Morton I. Abramowitz 1974-1978 Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Inter-American Affairs, Department of Defense Edmund McWilliams 1978-1980 Desk Officer for Laos, Cambodia & Vietnam, Washington, DC Lacy A. Wright, Jr. 1980-1981 Director, Kampuchea Working Group, Washington, DC Marie Therese Huhtala 1990-1992 Office Director, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Washington, DC Charles H. Twining 1991-1995 Ambassador, Cambodia Timothy Michael Carney 1992-1993 UN Director of Information and Education, Phnom Penh Franklin E. Huffman 1995-1997 PAO, Phnom Penh 2002 Acting PAO, Phnom Penh Marie Therese Huhtala 1996-1998 Office of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand & Vietnam Affairs, Washington, DC William N. Stokes Comments on Cambodia THOMAS J. CORCORAN Chargé d'Affaires Phnom Penh (1952) Ambassador Thomas J. Corcoran was born in New York in 1920. He entered the Foreign Service in 1950 and served in Spain, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Washington, DC, and was ambassador to Burundi. Ambassador Corcoran was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in 1988. Q: After you left Vientiane, you went to Phnom Penh. What were you doing there? CORCORAN: I was chargé. Q: Here you were an FSO-6, which is the equivalent in those days of a second lieutenant. CORCORAN: It was entry level, yes. 3 Q: You were representing the United States to one kingdom, and then you moved to Phnom Penh, which was also a kingdom. CORCORAN: But you must remember that the minister, as he was then, resident in Saigon, was accredited to the kings of both countries, and he would come up from time to time to visit. I, the charge, was assigned by the Secretary of State. When the minister, as he was then, arrived, he became the minister to Laos and Cambodia. Q: You were in Phnom Penh when? CORCORAN: I was there for a period of only about, I guess, eight months in 1952. This was some time after the French commissioner had been assassinated, and there was a French general there also acting as the civilian commissioner for a while. Then he left and was replaced by another French general, and they split it up again. The French forces in Cambodia at that time were pretty small. In Laos, there was very little fighting in those days, except in the south, and around some of the fringes of the very northern mountains. In Cambodia, there were two, as I recall, Cambodian movements, one Communist and one not Communist. Then the Viet Minh were also active. But it was still possible to drive from Phnom Penh to Saigon in those days. It took about four hours. You didn't want to stop everywhere en route, but you could drive back and forth in the daytime. They had watch towers. Q: What were your personal relations with the French military, both in Laos and in Cambodia? CORCORAN: Well, the personal relationships in Laos were very good. The French commander- in-chief of Laos was a colonel who had previously been Delattre's operations officer in North Vietnam. Then there was the chief of the gendarmery mission, and I was on friendly terms with both of them. Q: They didn't resent American influence or intrusion into their area? CORCORAN: They didn't, because they realized they were dependent on the American support in the main fighting in those days, which was in Vietnam. But also, most of these people had been graduates of World War II, and the gendarmery commander, whom I knew up there, had been liberated from a prison camp by U.S. Army forces. There was also the French commander- in-chief in Laos. He was a colonel, Redon. The commander-in-chief of the Lao National Army, as it was called in those days, was a French officer with the remarkable name of Stanislas D'Otton-Loyewski, obviously one of the Frenchmen of Polish ancestry. He, of course, wasn't very popular with the Lao, but he was the commandant of their Army. Q: Did you have any contact at all with any effort made by the Viet Minh or any of the forces opposed to try to gain some support from the United States? It's well known that certainly President Roosevelt was adamantly opposed to the reinsertion of the French into Vietnam, before he died. CORCORAN: He was. But of course, as I've mentioned before, the least opposition to that was 4 Lao opposition. But certainly you'd have some Lao who would complain about some of the French from time to time, but it was no great big thing in those days. You'd hear more of it in Cambodia, of course, where you had the Democrat Party, which was in opposition to the French and also in opposition to Sihanouk. The thing came to a head there, and Sihanouk dissolved the Huy Kanthoul government. This was something called the Partie Democrate, which was the party in power. Q: Would they be coming to you to try to get America on their side? CORCORAN: Not as plainly as that, but they would be giving me their views on things from time to time. As I say, I was there for just about four or five very crowded months. It was clear that the main struggle was between the Democrats and the French. The French were being pretty tough, because they had small forces there, and they were afraid that if they weakened, they'd be finished. The Democrat Party was composed of a lot of people who were very tough on their side. They weren't much interested in bargaining; they thought it wouldn't get them anywhere. But they would take a pretty strong position. They got into a deadlock with the then-King Sihanouk. One day, he dissolved the government, and French troops fanned out. Q: This is while you were there. CORCORAN: The French did send troops up there at the request of Sihanouk to protect the French civilians and Europeans. The net result was that most of the people who represented the Democrat Party in the streets were high school students, teen age students. They weren't anything like the Korean students, you know; they were just French high school students. They were not that much of a physical threat. Then the king set up a royal government. One of his relatives was the foreign minister, and he presided over things for a while. But then it must have been a year later, maybe in '53, that Sihanouk, in turn, split with the French. I think it must have been in the beginning of 1953, in the winter. He took off into the Angkor Wat area, which was then occupied by a dissident, a non-Communist, in protest against the French not giving him full authority. Actually, at one point he went over into Thailand as a self-invited guest of the Thai Government, which embarrassed them. They didn't do much for him. It was a publicity effort on his part to try to get the French to give him a little more leeway, so he would be better able to deal with the elements who had formerly supported the Democrats. Nothing much came of that. Then, of course, we drifted into the Geneva period. Q: Outside of meeting on a social occasion, no one was coming to you particularly through the side door and saying, "Give us some help," or "We want to get rid of these beastly French," or anything like that? CORCORAN: No.